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Twitter has set a price of $26 for its initial public offering of stock, which means the company’s shares can begin trading today on the New York Stock Exchange.

The price values Twitter at more than $18 billion based on its outstanding stock, options and restricted stock that’ll be available after the IPO.

Twitter Inc. had originally set a price range of $17 to $20 per share for its IPO, but analysts expected that to go higher. The company raised the range on Monday to $23 to $25 per share, signaling enthusiastic response from prospective investors.

The San Francisco-based short-messaging service is offering 70 million shares in the IPO, plus an option to buy another 10.5 million. It is set to begin trading this morning under the symbol TWTR.

With a public market debut, Twitter follows in the footsteps of LinkedIn, Facebook and other first-wave social-media companies, and faces many of the same questions about advertising revenue and staying power that its peers dealt with.

Those upbeat on the company’s prospects point to Twitter’s base of 232 million active users and its prominent place in driving online conversations.

The flip side of that, however, is that the company has yet to prove it has the chops to convert that enthusiasm into money. With just $317 million in revenue over the past year, Twitter is significantly smaller than Facebook was ahead of its IPO last year, when the tech giant reported $3.7 billion in yearly revenue.

The company has sunk a lot of money into leveraging its broad user base, including allowing advertisers to pay for “promoted” messages that appear in a user’s Twitter feed.

Twitter’s ad products show potential, said Larry Chiagouris, a professor of marketing at Pace University in New York. But the company might not be able to turn its platform into an indispensable tool for marketers.

As a whole, social media haven’t provided the return on investment that many advertisers want, he said. When it comes to Twitter in particular, he added, the network’s emphasis on real-time conversation about events such as the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards means even the strongest ads don’t have much lasting value.

“Those event-driven tweets are highly limited,” he said. “On the day-to-day kind of things, most people don’t have a lot to say. And most other people don’t care to hear what others are saying.”

And while Twitter’s ad revenue continues to grow — up to about 55 cents per user from 20 cents two years ago — analysts are concerned about a slowdown in user growth. Twitter already falls far behind competitors such as Facebook, which has more than 1 billion active users. Its user base grew by 5.5 percent in September, compared with growth of more than 10 percent in the same period last year.

Twitter’s decision to raise its price target indicates that there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the stock, said Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University. But, Damodaran cautioned, investors looking to add Twitter to their portfolio as a longer-term investment should wait until the buzz dies down a bit.

“The fact is, you can’t pay dividends out of buzz; you can’t create cash flows,” he said. “Let the mood and momentum play out.”